17 Health Benefits Of Having A Pet At Home – Discover Right Now!

Updates: 05/6/2019

Nowadays, most families have at least one pet. So, why do people have pets? The average domestic pet, such as a dog, cat, bird, or even a goldfish could supply people with a lot of benefits. Let’s discover top benefits of having a pet at home below to know why each of you should own a pet right now.

17 Health Benefits Of Having A Pet At Home – Why You Should Adopt A Pet Today

1. Breathe Easier

The first one in health benefits of having a pet at home that you discover here is easy breathing benefit. Why? There are many studies demonstrate that having a pet in your home will really lower the child’s likelihood of suffering related allergies. Those children who expose early on to any animals might develop stronger immune system in general. The more pets you have earlier in life, the fewer allergies you will develop.2. Improve Mood

Most pet owners nearly realize the instant joys coming with sharing their lives with a pet. However, they might know the mental health benefits that could also accompany with the comfortableness of snuggling up to an animal friend. Those people who own a pet are less likely to get depression or stress than those people without any pet.

Also, playing with your dog or cat can enhance the levels of dopamine and serotonin, that help people calm and relax. Even, the companionship of an animal could ease your loneliness, some pets are considered as a good stimulus for boosting mood.

3. Lower Blood Pressure And Get Healthier Heart

Having a pet has the potential to reduce blood pressure, especially in hypertensive as well as high-risk patients. The simple act of petting an animal can drop blood pressure during moments of stress, as well as improve the cardiovascular system, too.

Especially, your dog can make you less likely to get heart disease because dog owners walk more than those who do not have dogs. Heart attack survivors and people with abnormal heart rhythms, who own dogs are proven to live longer than those with the same problems who do not own a pet.

4. Boost Self-Esteem

People with pets have more self-esteem as well as feel less loneliness than those without pets. In other words, pet-owners are also, generally, more extroverted and less fearful than their non pet-owning peers. That is because pets could serves as critical sources of social support, supplying a lot of positive psychological and physical benefits for their owners.

5. Help You Socialize

While it might seem a bit counterintuitive, petting a dog could really enhance your opportunities to socialize. Because you have a dog, then you usually walk it around so you have more chances to meet people and increase your social contact, more socialization within neighborhoods.

6. Ease Pain

Pets could instill a greater sense of self-worth as well as self-esteem in their owners. Believe or not, pets could be the best medicine, particularly when a person is handling with chronic pain like arthritis or migraines. Like Valium, pets can reduce anxiety. The less anxiety, the less pain. Some studies about acute pain indicated that those adults who used pet therapy required less medication that those who did not.

7. Monitor Blood Sugar

According to studies, when pets live with diabetics, they can change their behavior as their owners’ blood sugar level reduced. This is similar to a reaction to chemical changes in their owners’ body. Therefore, today, there are many organizations which train dogs to support for people with the risk of unstable blood glucose levels or diabetics.

8. Help You Lose Weight

This sounds strange, but in fact, it is real. People who walk dogs are more consistent about regular exercise and express more enhancements in fitness than those who just walk with the human companion. It is surprised that the dog-walkers tend to eager for fitness or physical activities while the human walkers lean make excuses to avoid the workout. Moreover, the speed of walking among those, who walk with dog is much faster compared with those people walking with the human.

Scientific reports indicated that dogs are not only good at sniffing out skin cancer; some dogs could also detect lung, breast, ovarian, bladder, and colon cancer. It is not really clear that dogs can recognize some unknown tumor-related volatile compounds or conventional substances in the human body fluids associated with an enhanced risk of cancer, like metabolites of cigarettes. Nevertheless, in a certain experiment, dogs can identify cancer sufferers even among body fluid samples from people with inflammation or other diseases.

10. Decrease The Risk Of Eczema

A lot of parents are afraid of exposing their kids to dogs or other pets because the fearing of allergic triggers or eczema reactions. Yet, research shows that kids significantly reduced their risk of suffering from eczema if they start playing with dogs at infancy.

In reality, even to a kid who is sensitive to dog allergens, having a dog will not promote the risk of suffering from eczema.

11. Steer People Away From Allergic Foods

Some dogs are very good at sniffing out illicit bombs or substances. Dogs appear to be useful for detecting allergens.

For those whose peanut allergies are extremely severe, if they own dogs trained vigorously, their dogs can help detect the trace presence of peanuts in a certain room, like a candy bar hidden in the lunch bag or cookie left on the table.

Having a peanut-recognizing dog can ease the mind of peanut-allergic people. Nevertheless, they still need to carry an epinephrine pen in case of emergencies.

12. Pet Help Older Adults

The loss of family members and the physical changes of aging might lead to some major changes in older adults’ lives. Therefore, having a pet plays an importance role in a healthy aging lifestyle by:

Assisting people in finding meaning as well as joy in life. Caring for an animal will boost the moral and optimism and bring pleasure for the older. This also promotes the sense of self-worth.

Boosting vitality. When facing with the aging, people tend to overcome a lot of physical challenges. Pets can encourage laughter, playfulness, and exercises in the older, which could boost their immune system and develop their energy.

Staying connected. When you grow older, maintaining a connected social network is not as easy as when you are young. Illness, retirement, and moves could take away your close friends and loved ones. Making new friends even gets harder than ever before. Pets, in general, and dogs, in particular will be a great manner for seniors to spark up interesting conversations or meet new people.

13. Help You Rehabilitate From Sickness

When it comes to health benefits of having a pet at home, dog therapy is considered as a kind of booster that encourages interpersonal contact, mobility, and socialization among patients. Dogs can help to increase the interaction between those who are suffering from loneliness or physical disabilities.

Thanks to having a dog, the owner can reduce the risk of dying within one year of a heart attack and can avoid anxiety-related sicknesses than those who do not own dogs.

14. Help Children Develop

Everyone knows that kids love animals. Not only do children who grow with animals have less chances of asthma and allergies, many kids also learn compassion, responsibility, and empathy from owning a pet. The fact is, unlike parents or adults; pets do not set any orders, and never be critical. The mere presence of pet at home can supply a sense of security in children. For instance, having an animal in the home will help children ease their anxiety when their mom and dad are not around. There are many studies pointing out that pets can calm overly aggressive kids well. Both the child and the dog need to be trained in order to behave properly with each other.

Playing with pets can be good for the brain and body. This is a doorway to learn for a kid. While playing with pets, the child will improve their imagination as well as curiosity. Moreover, when a child is attached to a pet like a dog, they can learn to express their feelings in more ways and also relate better.

15. Help Children With Autism

This is an amazing one in a lot of health benefits of having a pet at home. Some children with autism or learning disorders can interact with pets better than with people. That might be as children with autism often rely on non-verbal cues for communicating, just like pets. Many parents comment on the positive changes seen in their autistic children around animals and how often the pets have an instinctive understanding of their children’s special demands. Here are some positive effects of pets on autistic children:

Pets will help children with learning disabilities know how to calm themselves and regulate depression as well as stress. Even, pets make them better equipped to overcome the difficulties of the disorder.

While playing with a pet, children with autism will stay alert and attentive. Also, caring for a furry friend can relieve the frustration and stress of an autistic kid caused by learning disability.

Once again, raising a pet can elevate disabled kids’ self-esteem that puts them the similar level with those children without disorders.

16. Reduce The Risk Of Asthma & Allergies

If you come from a family with allergy, you should adopt a pet because pets can help lesson the risk of asthma and allergies, according to a recent study, which was conducted by Dr. Germ from the University of Wisconsin Madison, published in the Journal of Allergy & Clinical Immunology.

In his study, Germ studied to find out evidence of allergic reactions in babies when they stayed with cats and dogs. First, he analyzed the babies’ blood immediately after birth. He checked their blood 1 year later. The evidence shown that these babies had less allergic reactions, other reactions to bacteria around their living environment and immunity changes. They also had no problem with eczema when playing or sleeping with dogs. It sounds weird, but the babies shown higher levels of their immune system as a hygiene hypothesis. Concretely, according to the study, infants living with dogs lowered allergy symptoms from 19% to 33%, especially skin allergies that cause itchiness and red patches.

However, pay attention to have your pet’s cleansed or had bath as when pets are dirty, they won’t safe to play and lower the risk of allergies and bad immunity in babies and even adults.

17. Ease Shyness & Isolation

According to a study released by a professor of behavioral sciences and psychiatry from Emory University, Atlanta, pets can help ease shyness and isolation, especially dogs. They can create love connections among people of different ages. For one who lives in an isolated world, pet can be his best friend with no condition and even helps him overcome the toughest time in his life. For people who love a certain kind of pet like dog or cat, they will be happy to join a dog or cat club, meet other dog lovers and create more relations and have more fun in pet raising. In other words, this activity helps develop your deeper and larger socialization, especially in interacting and meeting with other pet owners.

There are different suggestions for you to improve your social life with a pet. The following are some choices for you:

Dog parks: Parks are great places for you and your pet to play and build up a tighter bond, especially dogs – active pets and cheerful friends.

Training classes: As a pet owner, you can take part in a pet training like a pet kindergarten, learn pet parenting skills and train your well-behaved pets.

Outdoor cafes: You can take your pet go to a pet-friendly restaurant, bar and have a talk with other pet lovers. Why not? It’s a new trend to spice up your life!

Online: There are various pet sites that you can sign up and be a member of these pages such as Caster.com, Petpop.com and Dogster.com. Besides, there are tones of different pet-focused sites that provide you with different activities related to pet care, pet training, pet foods, pet leashes, pet selling or pet purchase and so on.

The above article uncovers to you some of the ways in which pets can have positive effects on our health. Hope that you find it interesting and useful for you. After reading all of the benefits of having a pet above, if you have any further idea related to this topic, feel free to drop your words at the end of this post.

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